Jim van Os

Jim van Os is Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Chairman of the Division Neuroscience at Utrecht University Medical Centre, Utrecht, The Netherlands, and Visiting Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK. He trained in Psychiatry in Casablanca (Morocco), Bordeaux (France) and finally at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley/Bethlem Royal Hospital in London (UK) and after his clinical training was awarded a three-year UK Medical Research Council Training Fellowship in Clinical Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In 1995, he moved to Maastricht University Medical Centre and in 2017 to Utrecht University Medical Centre. He leads the Division Neuroscience at Utrecht University Medical Centre and initiated a public health service for psychosis in the Netherlands. He is actively involved in mental health reform in the Netherlands as well as in Science in Transition, a movement that makes an effort towards making scientific research more relevant and impactful. Over the period 2009-2015, Jim van Os was coordinator of a €12M EU FP7 IP project on gene-environment interactions in schizophrenia, and is also active in clinical gene-environment interaction research in depression and bipolar disorder. The project identified multiple gene-environment interaction mechanisms underlying the onset of psychosis. He is on the editorial board of European and US psychiatric journals such as Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, European Psychiatry, Psychological Medicine, Schizophrenia Research, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Early Intervention in Psychiatry, Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, Psychosis Journal, The Journal of Mental Health and the Journal of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences. He is also an Academic Editor at PLoS ONE. He was a member of the Psychosis Group of the DSM-5 Task Force, and was co-chair of the APA DSM/ICD conference Deconstructing Psychosis. In 2011 he was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences,[3] and in 2023, of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen. Since 2014 he has been listed in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science list of "the world’s most influential scientific minds of our time". His colleagues have voted him "best psychiatrist in the Netherlands" multiple times. In 2023 van Os received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.